Imagine for a moment that you live in a world that derives its energy from a source that is about to be depleted. What would you have to do? The task would challenge you to engineer new technology to harvest the fuel, create new engines to turn it into energy and build new infrastructures to distribute it. And that’s the easy part. Along the way, you would need to convince bankers, politicians and the public to abandon comfortable orthodoxies, embrace radical change and invest in unproven ideas.
For centuries in Europe and early America, food was cooked, homes were heated and evenings illuminated by burning wood, and later whale oil. After the forests had largely been felled and whales hunted to the brink of extinction, people begun listening to energy prophets like Erwin Drake, who believed that the black slime bubbling out of the ground could be used as fuel. The revolution unleashed by Drake an other pioneers, like John D. Rockefeller, remade the world.
We are now in a similar threshold, not because the world is quickly running out of hydrocarbons (the United States has enough coal to last them for the next 200 years) but because we can’t live much longer with the consequences of their continued use. The earth is, quite simply, choking on greenhouse gases (global carbon dioxide output in 2006 approached a staggering 32 billion tons). In the years to come, fortunes will have to be invested on drilling wells into the ground looking for heat (geothermal heat) instead of oil, laying vast networks of pipelines to transport hydrogen rather than fossil fuels, building new power plants that collect energy from the sun and wind, and manufacturing cars that run on electricity or on fuel derived from corn, sugarcane (ethanol) or hydrogen instead of hydrocarbons. The pioneers who succeed in doing so will be the Rockefellers of the new age.
The good news is that solar power has never been hotter, but the not so good news is that, while solar power has enormous potential, it is still decades away from supplying a significant slice of the world’s overall energy consumption. As of 2006 that share was 0.4% according to the International Energy Agency. Why? To begin with, the technology is still in its infancy and the conundrum remains for now: a clean source of power that falls from the sky, cuts out the middleman and for which the fuel is free still costs more than the dirty old combustibles we pull out of the ground. But the bright side is solar cells now convert as much as 17% of the energy they gather from the sun into electricity, up from 6% when they were developed. At the same time the price of cells has plummeted: solar cells cost more than $200 per watt of generating capacity in the 1950s; the price was $2.50 per watt in 2004 and it is anticipated that in 2009 there will be a major breakthrough in the process of refining silicon into solar grade photovoltaic cells.
The cost of a watt of electricity generated by the breeze has dropped more than 80% in the United States meaning that powering home appliances there, like airconditioners, from a wind farm (with no carbon emissions) now costs roughly the same as hooking it up to a coal plant.
Because the center of the earth is hotter than the surface of the sun, nearly endless supplies of energy in the form of geothermal heat lie just a few miles beneath our feet. A 2007 report of the Massachusettes Institute of Technology calculated that a government investment of $500 to $800 over the next 10 years to develop a new technology called “heat mining” could yield a capacity of 100,000 MW, roughly the output of 200 large coal burning power plants, by 2050.
No biofuel is coming on stronger than ethanol, which is another name for pure alcohol. Corn-based ethanol is far from a perfect replacement for gasoline however. The current inefficient manufacturing process that turns corn into ethanol burns up almost the same energy as it produces. Extracting fuel from sugar makes more sense; it yields 8 times the energy it consumes.
The main concerns against nucear power are the disposal of nuclear waste, which can remain radio active for hundreds of thousands of years, and the safety of nuclear reactors. Nuclear advocates note however that a typical nuclear reactor produces around 30 thousand tons of dangerous waste a year, which can theoretically be safely stored underground, while the average coal plant produces 1,000 tons of harmful emissions each day.
Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, and it burns far more cleanly than fossil fuels. There are bountiful suppliesof it everywhere we look, but it is almost always chemically locked in compounds like water, which weaves hydrogen together with oxygen and is tricky to undo. Ironically, our current best way to get power from hydorgen is by burning oil, coal and natural gas. Their concentrated hydrogen content is what gives them energy in the first place. Its the carbon part of “hydrocarbon” that causes all the problems.
(Source: Global Warming Published by Time Books)
